The existence of specific lexical features marking the speech of female characters in Roman Comedy is signalled in scholiastic literature, and has been confirmed by modern quantitative research. This thesis, focusing on the comedies of Plautus, investigates the question of why the playwrights made specific linguistic choices for female personae. / Greek and Roman literary theory stipulated that the speech of women in drama had to be constructed so as to reveal the speakers' feminine nature. Philosophical doctrines that construed gender as a polar opposition evince a fundamental distinction, defining male as 'bond' and female as 'boundless'. The association of female with boundlessness, it is argued, also determines woman's position with respect to speech. A study of Greek New Comedy reveals that the reflections on female nature and expression found there depict woman as adverse to limits, a concept which Plautus seems to have subsequently adapted from his sources. / Donatus's scholia to Terence characterize female speech as disorderly and disrespectful of the norms of verbal interaction. Concrete linguistic patterns are rationalized as symptoms of 'softness' and querulousness, both representing the female propensity to violate interpersonal limits. The text of Plautus, examined for meta-textual asides on female speech, confirms the scholiast's observations. An inquiry into the Plautine perception of blanditia reveals that female mannerisms are interpreted as tokens of a contagious moral disorder, and that they earmark the feebleness of female (and effeminate) personae. The otherness of female complaints, emphasized during the performance of palliata by both verbal and para-verbal means, is intimately associated in the text of the comedies with the chaos within women's minds. Female speech patterns in Plautus thus illustrate the concept of infirmitas sexus.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.36765 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | Dutsch, Dorota. |
| Contributors | Richardson, Wade (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of History.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001780112, proquestno: NQ69873, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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